Abstract: This finding aid describes a wide-ranging collection of material relating to Oscar Wilde and to his literary and artistic
circle in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Great Britain.

Physical location: Clark Library.

creator:
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

Provenance

William Andrews Clark, Jr. acquired the nucleus of the Clark Library's Oscar Wilde collection from Dulau and Company, London,
in 1929. Most of the Dulau material had been in the possession of Robert B. Ross (Oscar Wilde's literary executor), Christopher
S. Millard (a.k.a. Stuart Mason, the Wilde bibliographer), and Vyvyan B. Holland (Wilde's only surviving son). Since 1929,
the Clark Library has steadily purchased important new material and in the year 2000, the collection was estimated to contain
over 65,000 items.

Access

Collection is open for research.

Restrictions on Use

Copyright has not been assigned to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. All requests for permission to publish or quote
from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Librarian. Permission for publication is given on behalf of the William
Andrews Clark Memorial Library as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply permission of the
copyright holder, which must also be obtained.

Many of the manuscript and print materials described within this finding aid have also been cataloged individually. Those
individual records for print materials are available via the UCLA Library's online catalog, while the records for manuscript
materials are accessible only through a physical card catalog located at the Clark.

In 1957, a printed catalog of all Wilde-related works then owned by the Clark Library (approximately 2900 items) was compiled
by John Charles Finzi and published as
Oscar Wilde and his Literary Circle by the University of California Press. Over the course of the next four decades, many new Clark acquisitions were added to
the collection and approximately one-third of the collection was microfilmed at least once.

In 2000, the first version of the Oscar Wilde and his Literary Circle online finding aid, which described
all archival materials in the Clark collections related to Wilde and his circle was written and encoded in EAD by John Howard
Fowler. In 2009, this original finding aid was separated into several parts, edited and re-encoded by Rebecca Fenning in order
to make its very large size (over 1000 pages) and scope more manageable for researchers. Instead of one guide describing the
entire collection, there are now 5 more easily navigated guides devoted to different components of the collection.

Biographical Note

Oscar Wilde was born Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde in Dublin, Ireland, October 16, 1854. He attended Trinity College
and Magdalen College, Oxford, winning the Newdigate prize in 1878 for the poem
Ravenna. He subsequently established himself in London society as a champion of the new Aesthetic movement, advocating "art for art's
sake," and publishing reviews and his
Poems (1881). After being satirized (and made famous) as Bunthorne, the fleshly aesthetic poet in Gilbert and Sullivan's
Patience, he made a year-long lecture tour of the United States, speaking on literature and the decorative arts. After his return
to London, he married Constance Lloyd in 1884; they had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan Holland. In 1891 he met and began a love
affair with the handsome but temperamental poet, Lord Alfred Douglas.

The 1890s saw both Wilde's greatest literary triumphs and his tragic downfall. His only novel,
The Picture of Dorian Gray , appeared in 1891. The most famous of his witty social comedies--
Lady Windermere's Fan (1892),
A Woman of No Importance (1893),
An Ideal Husband (1895), and
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)--were written and produced for the London stage. But in 1895, after becoming entangled in an unsuccessful libel suit
against Douglas's father, Wilde was prosecuted for homosexuality. Convicted, he was sentenced to two years' hard labor.

While in prison, Wilde wrote
De Profundis, a letter to Douglas, and after his release, he published the long poem,
The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). But despite these final works, his career was essentially over. Bankrupt and in exile, his health ruined in prison,
he died in Paris in 1900.

Scope and Content

The Oscar Wilde and His Literary Circle Collection of Papers is comprised of correspondence, draft manuscripts, notebooks,
photographs, drawings, newspaper clippings and other items that reflect the life of Oscar Wilde in the context of the literary
world of his day. The Wildeiana finding aid describes the ephemera and related materials portions of this collection, which
includes photographs and portraits of Wilde and his colleagues, literary and theater reviews, clippings, correspondence related
to exhibitions and conferences on Wilde, and various other materials.